For in that death of malls, what dreams may come? Archinect Sessions #32, featuring special guest co-host, Nam Henderson!

Dead malls and ghost boxes haunt this week's episode, featuring special guest and longtime 'Nector, Nam Henderson. Whether you're mourning or reveling in the dwindling population of the great American mall, their lifeless carcasses on the economic and urban landscape are starting to stink, and we have to deal with them somehow. With Nam as our spirit guide through the lost souls of dead malls, we discuss their future potentials within the suburban/urban environment, and grapple with their (perhaps bygone) social significance.

Nam also joins us for our discussion of very much alive-and-kicking news, including BIG taking over from Norman Foster as the designer for Two World Trade Center, and the ongoing student protests at Cooper Union. We also touch on the controversy surrounding CoContest, an Italian website for crowdsourcing design work, and its potentials for new models of architectural employment.

Listen to episode thirty-two of Archinect Sessions, "For in that death of malls, what dreams may come?":

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13 Comments

Thanks for the shout-out to Grady, Nam! He's a Louisville hero. Editor of Landscape Architecture mag for 25yrs, chair of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition, NPR essayist, and on and on. He loved the city, knew city issues, and analyzed and described its value and potential clearly and with elegance.

I was honored to be gifted his writing desk and part of his library before he died a couple of years ago. He was always gracious, generous, curious, and on the verge of delivering a well-crafted quip.

I would suggest demolishing many of them. In fact, we ought to be retreating from sporadic sprawl that chops up natural habitats and makes ecosystems less resilient. Just because we can drive miles to an energy gobbling box doesn't mean we should.

@Thayer-D, given the embodied energy represented by these buildings/sites and given your previously expressed preference for more traditional/historic forms of development, I would think you would be more willing to embrace the approach of Professor Dunham Jones and others. The whole goal of "Retrofitting Suburbia" is to make these sites mixed use, denser, and more like traditional forms of development.

Similarly, I mention in the podcast Brenda Case Scheer, who I saw speak at AIA National. Link to her book The Evolution of Urban Form (I have not read it). her presentation discussed "healing" the places we've already built by focusing on smaller-scale, site- and climate- and socially-appropriate adaptations.

Nam, I fully support the retrofitting of suburbia. In fact I think it's one of the most important issues of our time, for planners and architects. That is why I specifically mentioned sporadic sprawl, or ex-urban sprawl if you prefer. Some sprawl is beyond salvaging, it's too far out and disconnected. It makes no sense to make a blanket statement that all sprawl should be rehabilitated because the best way to re-habilitate sprawl is though mass transit, which will not be able to reach every outlying subdivision.

Considering what we now know about ecosystems and how animal habitats require a certain amount of geography to be viable, and I do think we should be abandoning some settlements, as crazy and politically impractical as that may sound. We should be folding in what we know ecologically into this discussion and not simply thinking that making every suburb dense will make them sustainable.

^ecologically, using native plants in landscapes can alleviate some of the problems...especially with invasive species and by providing wildlife corridors/micor habitats...collecting rainwater on site is another big one...What about transforming all those useless grassy drainage basins into rainwater harvesting spaces + community gardens...Every subdivision has one, and they are already designed to collect runoff...These are things that actually impact environmental health that can be super easy to achieve...I do not think an architectural solution needs to be sexy to be good.

As for a cultural retrofitting...I think we already have a huge amount of communities that can be studied. There are some decent suburbs. What distinguishes a culturally alive suburb from a "fast food nation" suburb is not the urban form, but more so the typology of the marketplace...For instance, I spent a small amount of time living in a town outside of Madrid. The town itself was suburban...I remember drawing a Figure Ground of the block trying to figure out why it was so different than an American suburb despite the very similar urban form...The answer was obviously the Hybridization between the New-World suburb and the Old world Market Place...the overall town still had a center filled with small businesses...butchers, bakers, pubs...Its life was all connected to the marketplace...Its where gossip happened, where people met up, where families spent free time, etc...Density overall was the same as any Beige stucco American suburb, There were plenty of new ugly houses as well, the difference was in the social life that was enabled through the marketplace...The experience of going to the Bakery by foot to buy really good bread and chatting with a sort of eccentric baker, vs. driving to a huge parking lot, walking through isles of junk food, to a corporate owned bakery to buy day old bread that smells like bandaids....Makes all the difference

Everything you said is absolutely right jla-x. Those human connections are the difference. The suburban model 'cleaned' up the messiness of life as Corb used to say. Being outdoors, walking, and running into people you know is better for your well being than any drug out there. Plus, that smaller scale economic model distributes the wealth much more equitably.